More Facts About Acts: Women

If we were to pick up the book of Acts and look for a theme in regards to women, we’d have a few choices. Women are mentioned either directly or indirectly over 20 times in the book of Acts. Here are a couple suggested themes:

How about the theme of suffering? (we might call this women’s sufferage;-)

There are three separate times that it mentions women who were tortured for their faith:

Acts 8:3 Saul committed women to prison,

Acts 9:2 That Saul might bring women bound to prison,

Acts 22:4 Saul/Paul testifies how he had committed women to prison before his conversion.

It’s true that they suffered but it’s not exactly a consistent “theme”.

How about the theme of women behaving badly?

Acts 5:1-11 When Sapphira lied for her husband and God judged her for her part.

Acts 12:13-16 Rhoda didn´t open the gate for Peter!

Acts 13:50 The Jews stirred up the “devout and honorable” ladies who did a pretty good job of joining with men to get Paul and Barnabas tossed out.

The problem with that one is the theme of men behaving badly is much more consistent, and the men are guilty of slightly worse offenses than “not opening gates”.

But how about a theme of Women Being Faithful?

In Acts chapter 2 Peter stands up and quotes the prophet Joel:

17" 'In the last days, God says,

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

your young men will see visions,

your old men will dream dreams.

18Even on my servants, both men and women,

I will pour out my Spirit in those days,

and they will prophesy.

We see the prophet Joel’s words come true in Acts. The very first European convert is Lydia. We see faithful women in Acts 10, 12, 16, 17, and 18. Thanks to our faithful sisters at Springfield…many of whom get limited press but do much of the work. Perhaps that is the major theme that has not changed since the first century . . .

Mark

Off the Bottom of My Screen

I have noticed there is a phenomenon at play in my life that drastically affects all I do. I suspect that it may be at play in your life as well. I call it "The Bottom of My Screen Syndrome". Basically it works like this: my life seems to revolve around people contacting me via emails. (Even my telephone voice mails at one job get automatically emailed to me as Mp3's.) They pile into my in box at a terrific rate. They come in fast enough that I can't possibly reply to all of them, so I find myself sort of randomly replying to the ones that are not urgently sent from someone work-related. Therefore, as soon as the emails disappear off the bottom of my screen...they join the thousands of others down there, and they are literally out of sight, out of mind. The only encouraging thing about this is that I don't yet have a Blackberry...which has an even smaller screen and thus subjects more and more of my emails to the "bottom of my screen" reality. Ironically, as I write this bulletin article it is this reality that causes me to forget to send an article to Carrie much of the time!

Sadly, we live in a culture where this is the way we operate. Priorities are often sacrificed because they get pushed off the bottom of our screens. Whoever shouts the loudest or sends the most SPAM gets our attention. God, who does not play that game, often gets pushed so far down the screen that we never even think of him. We are too busy handling the things on our screens... regardless of whether they are all that important.

Paul did not have this problem. God never left his screen, never became an after thought, and never got pushed aside by the worries of the day. This was true of Paul before he met Jesus, as he endeavored to serve his Lord as a Pharisee of Pharisees. But it was even more true of his life AFTER he met Jesus. Before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus he was passionate about serving God, but after he met Jesus he began giving speeches like the one he gave in Acts 17, where he said, "God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else."

What was it that kept service to God on Paul’s screen even after he realized that the old-school-Pharisee motivation for serving God was not the main reason to serve him?

Mark

Some Facts about Acts

It’s not a fact that Luke wrote Acts, but evidence points us in that direction.

Here are some facts:

Acts was written on a Papyrus roll (35 to 40 feet long).
Both Luke and Acts are about the same length in material.
Luke is the longest book in the New Testament. Acts is the second longest book in the NT.
Both books describe arrests and trials in about the same way. Luke spends almost ¼ of his gospel on Jesus’ arrest and trial. Luke spends almost ¼ of Acts on Paul’s arrest and trial.
Both books are written to the same man, Theophilus, who may have hired a copyist to make copies of these two books so that they were distributed around the ancient world. Both books cover around 30 years of history...the gospel starting around 4 BC and ending around 30 AD. Acts picks up at about 30 AD and ends close to 60 or 62 AD. The gospel foreshadows Acts with references to things that are not fulfilled until Acts is laid out.

Themes in Luke are continued in Acts:

1) Favorable attitude towards Samaritans (Luke 9:52-56; 17:11-19; Acts 8)
2) Role of women among Christ followers (Luke 8:1-3; Acts 16 & 18)
3) Clarification that John the Baptist was NOT the Messiah (Luke 3:15 & Acts 13:25; 19:5)

Some seeds that were planted in Luke are cultivated and matured in Acts. Ancient authors who wrote histories tried to make the volumes symmetrical in size and scope. Luke has done this with his gospel and Acts.

Mark

Peter Said, Paul Said

I wonder if Peter and Paul were friends. They had a lot in common. Both were passionate about their faith, living it out in impressive, larger-than-life fashion. Each had plenty of baggage from his background to remind him of past failures. Paul surely had those pesky memories of hunting down families and persecuting them. Peter must have had haunting recollections of telling Jesus he would never forsake him one moment only to forsake him three times that very same day. Also, both these men offer seemingly different presentations of the gospel message in the book of Acts.

Peter, a man of action, stresses action in his Acts chapter two sermon. "Repent and be baptized," he says. When Paul recounts his story of how he experienced salvation in Acts 22:16, he tells of meeting Jesus and Jesus instructing him to go see Ananias who says, "What are you waiting for? Go be baptized!" Ananias (as Paul retells it) feels a certain amount of urgency in this. In fact, it seems like a directive and not a mere suggestion.

However, equally plentiful are the messages from the two of these men that emphasize not OUR action but God's action in the salvation process. Referring to the conversion of Cornelius in Acts 15, Peter declared, "Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us" (7-8). He continued by affirming that God "made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith" (9). Cornelius had received the Holy Spirit when he believed the Gospel. He was saved by faith-plus-nothing. Peter makes no mention of turning from sins, of baptism, of circumcision, or anything else. What's more, Peter specifically ruled out any role for works in our salvation, adding the powerful words, "Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they" (10-11).

Similarly, in the conversion of the Philippian jailer in Acts 16, the jailer asks the question, "…what must I do to be saved?" (30). Paul's answer is unequivocal: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved…" (31). (Yet even in this instance we see the jailer and his family urgently baptized in the middle of the night.)

So what do we do? Do we ignore baptism as so many of our evangelical brothers and sisters seem to do? Or do we speak only of baptism and refuse to call others “brothers and sisters” unless they agree with us? Today we look at what Peter and Paul said about it in the book of Acts.
Mark

Acts 2: 38

Remember the guy in the rainbow wig who used to go to all the NFL games with a John 3:16 sign? You can bet the guy was not a church of Christer because if he were and he had the chance to show the world the Bible’s most important verse, he would have selected Acts 2:38 instead.

Peter does a masterful job in this sermon. He convicts he audience of their compliance in the death of an innocent man with the logic of a prosecuting attorney and the emotion and passion of a gospel preacher. He also offers us a great outline for what we can tell others when we speak. “Change your mind, change your heart and die (be baptized)”…that’s what it means to decide to follow Christ. And those who do get the amazing gift of he Holy Spirit to guide them in their journey. At the heart of Peter’s plea seems to be this: “You have chosen against God in the past, it’s time to choose God.”

That “plan” has been called by us and others the “plan of salvation”. Peter lays it out pretty clearly and does not want anyone to miss it. (By the way, the most notable group to call it a “plan of salvation” and use that exact same phrase is the Mormons.)

This week we will look at Peter’s first sermon and what it says about him and his expectations for the church. We compare his message with Paul’s later messages in Acts which quite often seem to counter Peter’s “here is how to choose God” messages with “here is how God CHOSE me” messages. Can they both be true? And how dangerous is it to ignore one or the other?

Mark

Luke-Acts: Community of Place

We have spent the last several months talking about Luke and the significance of the table in Luke. We talked a lot about this "table" being a metaphor for God's intention, which is that people would be brought into fellowship with Him. As we venture into ACTS, Luke's second book, we see God’s Church emerge as the ultimate representation of that fellowship.

But the Church is about more than fellowship. Country-clubs, alumni groups and other social organizations provide great food and fellowship for people each week as well. CS Lewis reminds us that the church differs from these other organizations in that they all provide a "unity of likings". In other words, people with common interests and tastes and probably similar backgrounds and political opinions, tend to gather in social groups around the world. They "like" the same stuff and they join organizations (like golf clubs) that offer them the opportunity to hang out with people of similar likings. But more than a community of likings, the church is a community of place. People come together simply because it is THE place God calls them to be, not because they all like the same stuff or have similar backgrounds, but because it is God's institution to change them and the world around them.

Obviously there are potentially big problems for churches who deal improperly with the tendency of people to gravitate towards "likings". We see some churches that are really nothing more than a gathering of likings; everyone looks sort of the same, drives similar cars, even dress sort of alike each Sunday. Many people spend their lives church shopping, hunting for that place where they "like" everyone and everyone there likes the same sort of stuff they do. Such an environment and such an attitude produce churches that are an inch deep and a mile wide. My experience is that they are often big and slick, have great coffee bars and nifty websites. Many of their "likings" are best seen in their corporate worship expressions which are measured by a slicker-the-better mentality and judged by how entertaining they are for the masses.

I don't think railing against the "community of likings" mentality is the most useful thing I could say to our congregation at Springfield. One look around and it's pretty easy to see that we are not geared to keep that crowd. We are not all alike, not from the same social clubs or political parties or economic backgrounds. We don't put a lot of effort into making our services slick or entertaining. However, if we don't watch it we may be guilty of falling down the other side of that slippery slope. The other side is perhaps not as shallow, but if left unchecked, can be as arrogant as the other side is shallow. It's a side which I might call the "if-you-don't-like-it-lump-it" side. This side correctly says, "We are not here to entertain you!" Then, rather than admit there might be room for diversity in what people like and don't like...we draw up a list as long as your arm of Biblical reasons to justify our dislike for the community of likings crowd. This side of the coin refuses to admit that actually liking something (say a worship service or a Bible study group) is possible.

This week we will talk about how we make those decisions by looking at how the early church used to make those decisions.

Mark